The Annihilation of Inertia: Dostoevsky and Metaphysics (Liza Knapp, 2016) 

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Dostoevsky’s fictional universe is beset by inertia and other physical laws. While some heroes struggle by various means to annihilate this mechanical force, others submit to it. Dostoevsky uses a hero’s response to this mechanical principle to reveal the hero’s stance on the ultimate questions of human existence, those he himself pondered at the time of his wife’s death. 

Dostoevsky’s early training as an engineer in a sense prepared him for this metaphysical dimension to his thinking by acquainting him with the principles of physics whose implications he later explored in his works. At the Academy of Military Engineers, where he began studies in 1838, Dostoevsky took at least one course in physics. He gave up the military and engineering in 1844, but his interest in science outlived this short career. On 27 March 1854, Dostoevsky, in exile for political activity that nearly led to his execution, asked his brother to send him books, imploring him to “understand how necessary this spiritual food” was. 

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Inertia, the mechanical principle whose “annihilation,” Dostoevsky thought, would result in eternal life, figured prominently in the physics and philosophy of his time. Isaac Newton had posited inertia as an innate property of all physical matter in the first law of motion of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica [Mathematical principles of natural philosophy] of 1687. In part as a consequence of the efforts of Peter the Great (who might even have met Newton in London) to import Western science into Russia, Newtons doctrines quickly became known in Russia and were to play an important role in the new Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences. 

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When Newton referred to the force of inertia (or vis e), he meant the innate resistance to change exhibited by all physical bodies, whether in rest or in a state of uniform motion. In Dostoevsky’s works, the concept figures as kosnost’, as inertsiia, or more covertly as an unnamed mechanical force that makes the natural world appear as a machine. 

Definitions of this physical principle are often couched in negative terms, portraying inertia as an inability to change. The physics textbook Dostoevsky asked his brother to send him defines inertia in such terms: “Any body which is at rest cannot begin to move on its own. Any body which is in motion cannot change its state of motion on its own.” Subsequently I. Fan-der-Flit, characterizing inertia in the Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopedia, wrote: “The attribute of inertia is a strictly negative attribute; it is the absolute inability of bodies to change their motion.” Definitions of this sort make inertia appear as a defect or vice, whereas Newton originally formulated the principle in positive terms: “Every body continues [perseveres] in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, unless it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed upon it.” 

Inertia, as articulated by Newton, contradicts the basic principles of Aristotelian physics, by suggesting that the natural world is ruled by mechan­ics. 

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Tolstoy refers to inertia as one of the governing forces of nature: “The forces of the life of nature lie outside of us and we are not conscious of them, and we call these forces gravitation, inertia, electricity, animal force, etc.; but we are conscious of the force of human life and we call it freedom.” The overall vision of this epilogue is of a universe reduced to mechanics, or calculus. 

In his “Lectures on God-manhood” (1878), Vladimir Solovyov presents an understanding ofinertia that is kindred to Dostoevsky’s.58 Solovyov demon­strates that subjection to the mechanical necessity of inertia contradicts philosophical understandings of what constitutes a living being. He writes that “a living being must possess an active force and must be capable of movement and change, for a dead, inert mass is not a living being.” 

The Force of Inertia: Dostoevsky’s Confessional Heroes and the “Tragedy of the Underground” 

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Evil performed out of an inability to overcome resistance to change— out of inertia—constitutes a form of “mechanical” sin of interest to philoso­phers and theologians alike. Theologians have discussed a related phenom­ enon, that of akedia, or accidie, considered a major sin by both the Orthodox and Roman Catholic Churches. It is characterized in the following passage by a nontheologian, Aldous Huxley: 

Inaccurate psychologists of evil are wont to speak of accidie as though it were plain sloth. But sloth is only one of the numerous manifestations of the subtle and complicated vice of accidie. Chaucer’s discourse on it in the “Parson’s Tale” contains a very precise description of this disastrous vice of the spirit. “Accidie,” he tells us, “makith a man hevy, thoughtful and wrawe.” It paralyzes human will, “it forsloweth and forsluggeth” a man whenever he attempts to act. From accidie comes dread to begin to work any good deeds, and finally wanhope, or despair.3 

The sluggishness associated here with accidie suggests an inertial body de­ prived of “vital force.” 

Inertia also figures among philosophers as a similarly threatening force. For example, Johann Gottlieb Fichte warns that “inertia of the spirit” “repro­ duces itself ad infinitum out of long-standing habit” and “soon becomes an utter incapacity for doing good.”4 (The inability to do good, resulting from inertia, likewise will become a focus of Dostoevsky’s attention.) Fichte even declares inertia to be “the true, inborn, fundamental sin, lodged in human nature itself.”5 If inertia is, as Fichte maintains, such a fundamental “sin,” it should be no surprise that Dostoevsky’s confessions focus so obsessively on it. 

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Dostoevsky’s confessional heroes, like Augustine and Rousseau, dis­cover inertia within themselves. Inertia causes them to resist change, it prevents new acts, it chains them to past habits, and it sometimes even makes action of any sort impossible. Like Augustine, they recognize the pernicious effects of inertia as well as the threat it poses to free will. Unlike Rousseau, they do not approve of inertia just because it is “natural.” Yet Dostoevsky’s confessional heroes, the underground man, and the husband in “The Meek One,” fail to overcome the inertia and mechanical forces in their lives. Consequently their confessions end without resolution, leaving their heroes more frustrated than before. Their vision of inertia naturally becomes more tragic than that of Augustine (who disarmed the threat of inertia) and that of Rousseau (who discounted the threat to begin with). 

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The underground man has grown so used to his will being inoperative that he has given up trying to change. He explains that this resistance to change comes about with the realization that 

you will certainly never become another person and that even if in fact there were still time and faith left to change yourself into something else, as like as not, you yourself would not want to change; and if you should have the desire to do so, why even then you wouldn’t do anything because, as it turns out, there is, it seems, nothing to change yourself into. And the essential thing and the end result is that all this occurs as a result of the normal and fundamental laws of hyperdeveloped consciousness and as a result of the inertia directly resulting from these laws and, consequently, not only do you not change but, what’s more, you simply don’t do anything at all. (5:102) 

He has surrendered to his inertia; he uses this inertia and “the normal and fundamental laws of hyper-developed consciousness” as an excuse for doing nothing. 

Inertia explains why the underground man has not been able to “be­come” anything: “Not only could I not become evil, I could not even manage to become anything; not evil, not good, not a scoundrel, not an honest man, not a hero and not an insect” (5:100). In not being able to become anything, the underground man resembles Rousseau, who maintained that he was kept in a state of mediocrity, “far from great virtues and even further from great vices “ by his natural tendency to inertness. 

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The underground man declares that his inertia results, at least partly, from the abnormal conditions in which he lives. In particular, he blames the hypertrophy of his consciousness (of which inertia is the “fruit”) on the Petersburg environment: “I swear to you, ladies and gentlemen, being too conscious is a disease, a true, honest-to-goodness disease. For human use, ordinary human consciousness would be more than enough, that is, half or a fourth of that portion which falls to the lot of the sophisticated man of our miserable nineteenth century, who, moreover, has the double-barreled misfortune of residing in Petersburg, the most abstract and contrived city on the whole face of the earth” (5:101). 

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The underground mans defense of free will is full of irony, however, since it comes from someone who admits that his life is determined by the “normal and fundamental laws of hyperdeveloped consciousness” and “the inertia directly resulting from these laws” (5:102). Although the underground man presents the natural man as his “antithesis,” they are alike in that both the underground man and the men of action submit to determinism. (In this sense, Dostoevsky clearly does not present the underground man as a viable and/or desirable alternative to the man of action. His point is that both are ultimately materialists, who bow to scientific law.) The “laws of hyperdeveloped consciousness” are at least as tyrannical as, and, as the underground mans confession reveals, a form of, the laws of nature. 

The mechanical principles ruling the lives of the natural, active men might initially appear to differ greatly from the “conscious inertia” of the underground, which means “sitting with arms at rest” and not moving at all. But the men of action blindly continue in uniform motion over which they have no control. In this manner, both types of existence discussed in the underground man’s confession—his own conscious stasis and the men of action’s mindless motion—are actually determined by the same law, which in Newton’s formulation embraces the blind continuance of both motion and rest or the inability to change either of these states.25 In Notes from the Underground, both the underground man and the men of action have lost the capacity for freely willed, self-generated, and self-directed motion. They have no vital force. 

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Inertia, as understood in definitions of material bodies, amounts to the property of matter whereby it asserts itself, not allowing other bodies to take its place. The concept of self-assertion figures centrally in the understanding of inertia presented by Lomonosov in 1743-44, as he attempted to give his own rendition in Russian of the basics of mechanics. Inertia is so crucial to his understanding of matter that he defines a body as “extension, possessing the force of inertia. . . . That by which one body resists another is called force of inertia. . . . Since a body by force ofinertia resists another, then, consequently, space, filled with some body, cannot receive another body: this is what is called impenetrability [nepronitsaemost’].”47 Matter, as defined by Lomonosov, is innately self-assertive. 

In an article published in Dostoevsky’s Time in March 1863, Strakhov characterizes the materialist conception of matter in terms of three qualities: “extension [protiazhennosf], impenetrability [nepronitsaemost’] and inertia [inertsiia].” These concepts are related; all suggest the tendency of a material body to hold its own, not to give way or move to the side for another body. Thus bodies of matter “demonstrate resistance [soprotivlenie] when something changes their position or movement is space. This resistance is called the force of inertia [sila inertsii] and this is one of the most obscure concepts in mechanics.”48 

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Initially, her spontaneous compassionate behavior moves the under­ ground man (“I too broke down and sobbed as never before” [5:175]). This moment of spontaneous feeling passes and his former, self-assertive behavior starts up again: concerned that “their roles had definitively reversed,” that “she [was] now the heroine and I [was] just such a humiliated and downtrodden creature as she was in front of me that other night, four days before,” he must retaliate further and regain his feeling of power over her, which he attempts by making love to her and then giving her money (5:175). Although his encounter with Liza seems to jolt him out of his inertia (“That evening I sat home, barely alive from all the spiritual pain. Never have I borne so much suffering and repentance” [5:178]), inertia reasserts its rule: “‘Peace and quiet’ was what I wished for, I wished to be left alone in the underground. ‘Vital life’ out of lack of habit oppressed me to the point where it was even becoming hard to breathe” (5:176). If the underground man returns so quickly to his habitual state of inertia, it is because it requires no effort from him.54 “Vital life,” on the other hand, necessitates expenditure of energy. When Liza leaves, the underground man loses his hope of escaping from the hell of the underground. His “I” stood in the way, keeping him from running after her. 

The underground man who narrates part 1 no longer makes any attempt to rejoin “vital life,” such as the earlier attempt described in part 2. It might seem that when he decided to write his confession, he was overcoming his “conscious inertia,” defined as “sitting with arms at rest.” Indeed, he voices half-hearted hopes that his confession will have positive effects: solace, relief from boredom, the kindness and honesty that result from toil (5:123). Writing a confession would mean overcoming his inertia at least in the sense that he had to unfold his arms to begin to write. 

For the underground man, the act of writing his confession becomes a way of further manifesting his inertia and impenetrability—his refusal to cede the way to others and his need to protect himself. 

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In the drafts for the section where his wife comes up to him while he is asleep and points a revolver at his head, the husband comments directly on the extreme susceptibility of the meek to this force of inertia:56 “The meek are such, they surrender to motion, they don’t reason. The revolver. Due to the downhill inertia of weakening of feeling. Phew, what nonsense I’ve written. But, truly, it is inertia, and downhill” (24:318-19). In the final version of this passage, specific mention of inertia disappears, but mechanical principles such as inertia and gravity are implicit in the metaphorical model for his wife’s behavior that he develops: 

Her prior decisiveness could shatter against a new, extreme sensation. They say that people standing on an altitude somehow gravitate of their own accord downwards, into the abyss. I think that many suicides and murders have been committed simply because the revolver had already been taken in hand. That also is an abyss, it’s a forty-five degree inclined plane which one has no choice but to slide down, and something invincibly causes you to pull the trigger. However, the realization that I had seen everything, that I knew everything and that I was awaiting death from her silently, was able to hold her back on the inclined plane. (24:21) 

He depicts himself as an external force, interrupting her inertial slide down the inclined plane. 

Similarly, he argues that her suicide, an “inertial accident,” would have been averted had he arrived home five minutes earlier. He assumes that he would have once again acted as an “external force” interfering with the inertial progress of her plan: “What’s most offensive is the fact that all this is an accident—a simple, barbarous, inertial accident! This is the offense! Five minutes, only, only five minutes late! Had I come five minutes sooner—then the moment would have floated by like a cloud, and it would never again have come into her head” (24:34). Evading responsibility, the husband depicts his wife’s death as an event determined by chance and other causes beyond their control. He asks: “And what if it was anemia? Simply because of anemia, because of the exhaustion of vital energy? She got tired this winter, that’s what. . .” (24:35). When he suggests that anemia and exhaustion of vital energy caused his wife to act as she did, he seems to offer a mechanistic biological explanation for her behavior: her bodily machine wound down.57 

Toward the end of his confession, the husband suddenly admits his own guilt for what has transpired. He confesses that he is responsible for sapping her of her vital energy: “I tortured her [to death]—that’s what!” (24:35). At this point, he moves away from his atomistic stance. 

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In the tenth lecture, Solovyov continues his description of the fallen world, opening with the statement “Having fallen away from divine unity, the natural world appears as a chaos of uncoordinated elements.” In this fallen state, “each individual being, each element excludes and repulses all others and, resisting this external action, occupies a certain fixed place, which it strives to keep exclusively for itself, demonstrating the force of inertia and impenetrability. The complex system of external forces, shoves and movements resulting from such a mechanical interaction of elements constitutes the world of matter. ” If the ideas are applied to human beings, Solovyov is describing Dostoevsky’s “underground” where bodies behave selfishly and self-assertively, their inertia and impenetrability hindering their ability to love another in anything but a tyrannical way.65 

Much like Dostoevsky, Solovyov associates inertia with a fallen, sinful state in which human beings manifest egotism and suffer as a result. Solovyov, like Dostoevsky, implies that fallen man becomes subject to the forces acting on matter and that man’s task is to attempt to transcend these forces and return to his original state of freedom from them. 

The Resurrection from Inertia in Crime and Punishment 

MECHANICS, MATHEMATICS, MURDER 

IN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, Dostoevsky dramatizes the conviction voiced in the diary entry written at the time of his first wife’s death—that “inertia” and “the mechanics of matter” result in death (20:175): Raskolnikov, acting under the influence of mechanistic principles, commits murder. The link between deterministic natural law and death, which appeared theoretical or metaphorical in the diary entry, becomes actual and violent. In Crime ancl Punishment Dostoevsky also seeks to illustrate the conviction (voiced in the diary entry) that the “annihilation of inertia” results in eternal life: the murderer, Raskolnikov, is liberated from mechanical determinism and begins a new life. 

Dostoevsky insists on the connection between mechanics and death by using mechanical imagery to describe Raskolnikov’s behavior prior to and during the murder. Dostoevsky writes, for example, that Raskolnikov per­ formed the act “barely sentient and almost without effort, almost mechanically [mashinal’no]” (6:63). While such details communicate the calculating, cold­ blooded nature of Raskolnikov’s act, they also serve to imply that Raskolnikov had lost what in the physics of the time was termed “vital force”: he had become inertial matter, whose behavior is determined by mechanical law. In describing Raskolnikov’s state of mind in the period leading up to the murder, Dostoevsky depicts him as passive and devoid of will.1 Once Raskolnikov’s original plan was conceived, the rest followed mechanically, according to logic.2 Necessity and mechanics seem to determine Raskolnikov’s behavior; he acts “as if someone compelled him and drew him toward it” (6:58). 

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Dostoevsky expands on this notion by developing the following simile: “The last day, having dawned so accidentally, deciding everything at once, had an almost totally mechanical effect on him: it was as though someone had taken him by the hand and was dragging him behind, irresistibly, blindly, with unnatural strength, without objections. It was as if part of his clothing had fallen into the wheel of a machine and [the wheel] was starting to pull him into [the machine]”3 (6:58). This image of a machine suggests that the circumstances that “compelled” Raskolnikov to murder are related to the realm of mechanics, at least metaphorically. Dostoevsky’s strategy in using this mechanical imagery conditions the reader to accept the important connection between death and mechanics—which Dostoevsky spelled out for himself in his diary entry of 16 April 1864 and which he spends much of the rest of Crime and Punishment developing. 

The significance of Dostoevsky’s machine imagery was appreciated by Tolstoy, who was to refer to Raskolnikov’s acting “like a machine” in his 1890 essay “Why People Stupefy Themselves,” a fact that has been discussed by Robert Louis Jackson.7 According to Tolstoy, man consists of two beings, one sensual, the other spiritual. The sensual being “moves as a wound-up machine moves,” whereas the spiritual being judges the activity of the sensual being. Tolstoy sees Raskolnikov’s mechanical murder as the result of his spiritual side having been stifled—a process that came about not through dramatic decisions but as a result of a series of “inchmeal” inner changes. He writes: 

Raskolnikov’s true life transpired not when he killed the old woman or her sister. Killing the old woman and especially her sister, he was not living true life, but rather was acting like a machine, he did what he could not help but do: he let out the energy he had already been charged with. One old lady was dead, the other was there in front of him and the ax was there in his hand. 

Raskolnikovs true life took place not when he saw the sister of the old woman but rather when he hadn’t yet killed a single old lady, hadn’t intruded into an apartment for the sake of murder, didn’t have the ax in his hands, didn’t have the loop in his coat on which he hung it—[it took place] when he wasn’t even thinking about the old woman but was lying home on his couch and not pondering the old woman at all or even whether or not it’s allowed for the will of one man to erase from the face of the earth a useless and harmful other person, but rather was pondering whether or not he ought to live in Petersburg, whether or not he ought to take money from his mother and still other questions having nothing whatsoever to do with the old lady. 

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Tolstoy’s basic understanding of Raskolnikov’s mechanical behavior resem­bles Dostoevsky’s in the sense that both writers believe such machinelike behavior to result from a “stifling” of “the voice of conscience.” Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky regard the murder of the pawnbroker as the mechanically determined outcome of a series of mental operations that began long before the murder was conceived and that allowed Raskolnikov to “stifle the voice of conscience.” 

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Crime and Punishment is thematically linked with other Dostoevsltian works that treat the theme of regeneration, restoration, resurrection, that imply a triumph over inertia.46 

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Whereas Dostoevsky in the forties had seemed to believe that insti­ tutional changes (such as the abolition of serfdom) might bring deliverance from the force of inertia, as time went on, he grew increasingly mistrustful of attempts at a large-scale cure for society. Just as he rejected Peter’s reforms on the grounds that they were despotically inflicted on the people from above, so too did he reject socialist attempts to rehabilitate mankind. He wrote in his notebook in 1864: “The socialists want to regenerate man, to liberate him, to present him without God and without family. They conclude that, having once change his economic situation by force, the goal will have been achieved. But man changes himself not because of external causes, but by no other means than a moral transformation” (20:171). This passage sheds light on Dostoevsky’s views of socialism and advocates of new social theory, such as Luzhin, in Crime and Punishment. Here Dostoevsky recognizes that the socialists seek to regenerate man,47 but he objects because they attempt to do it externally, just as in the notebooks to Crime and Punishment he recognizes their belief in progress but objects because they attempt to achieve it by mechanizing human existence (7:161). 

Although Dostoevsky may have believed inertia to be a sociohistorical phenomenon, the realm in which he sought solutions to this inertia was the individual human soul. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky does not advocate political and social reform but moral transformation through love. Love becomes the means to annihilate inertia. But without the active participation of Raskolnikov, no regeneration can occur. 

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Death, and what lies beyond death, can, however, be observed from this latter viewpoint; Dostoevsky’s “Bobok” (1873) is, as Jackson has shown, a case in point.8 In this short work, published in Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky describes life after death among the decomposing corpses of a cemetery. Inertia, rather than be annihilated, continues as the prime mover of this grotesque Newtonian underworld. References are made to the fact that the corpses continue life “out of a land of inertia” (21:44) and “as if from inertia” (21:51). “Bobok” amounts to the materialist realm described in Notes 

from the Underground perpetuated after a death, with the difference that the characters in “Bobok,” unlike the underground man, do not even have a glimpse of something better than their materialism. 

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He tells Rogozhin at one point that during his attacks he begins to understand “the extraordinary saying that ‘there will be time no more’ ” (8:189). His epilepsy allows him to experience two aspects of paradise as Dostoevsky imagined it, a feeling of joyful synthesis and a feeling of being outside of time.46 Epilepsy is thus presented as the opposite of inertia. 

These sensations during Myshkin’s attacks, brought about by an illness, an abnormal biological state, allow him to experience another physics. Im­ portant here is that his epilepsy allows him to experience time from the frame of reference of eternity, in other words, from a frame of reference in which the earthly laws of nature do not hold.47 His experience during his epileptic attacks serves as an emblem of the resurrection and the transcendence of the laws of nature it involves. Myshkin thus is conditioned through his epilepsy to accept a “fantastic” reality, transcending the laws of nature governing life on earth. 

Although his attacks transfigure him momentarily, Myshkin soon plunges into darkness, associated with spiritual agony, from which he eventu­ ally returns to his normal state. The light he experiences does not succeed in initiating him into a “new life,” just as the horizon in Switzerland which em­ bodied “new life” remained out of reach (8:51). Yet these tastes and glimpses of “new life” convince the Prince of the existence of this “fantastic” reality. 

Before his epileptic attack, Myshkin had been planning to go to Pav­ lovsk, “to Aglaya” (8:193). After the attack and Rogozhin’s attempt on his life, he yearns for Aglaya’s company all the more. 

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Modern man, according to Lebedev, would not have made this unex­ pected change; he would have been ruled by the law of self-preservation that moved him to murder, by the inertia of his past habit, and by all of the external reasons not to confess. Modern man lacks what he terms “a binding idea”: “Show me something of such strength [as a binding idea] in our age of vices and railroads . . . that is, I should have said: in our age of steamships and railroads but I say: in our age of vices and railroads because I’m drunk, but fair!” (8:315) 

In The Idiot, the railroad becomes more than a fact of modern, indus­ trializing life, and more than the prime mover of the industrial universe. It becomes a metaphysical force. Earlier on, Odoevsky in his Russian Nights (1844) had likewise seen deeper symbolism in the railroad: 

Indeed, the railroads are an important and great thing. They constitute one of the tools given to man for victory over nature; a deep meaning is hidden in this phenomenon, which evidently has been reduced to nothing more than stocks, debits and credits; in this struggle to destroy time and space is manifested mans feeling of his importance and his superiority over nature; in this feeling, perhaps, there is some recollection of his former strength and of his former slave, nature . . . But God save us from focusing all our mental, spiritual and physical forces solely on a material development, however useful it may be: whether railroads, paper mills or cotton factories.65 

Odoevsky’s mythic understanding that man was once the master and nature, the slave, and that at present those roles have been reversed, much to man’s chagrin, is another version of the patristic idea that man originally was the 

The railroad, as Odoevsky recognizes, might seem to allow man to break free from nature, to “destroy time and space,” and thus be restored to his original state of freedom and mastery over nature. But this is an illusion. Similarly, the argument underlying The Idiot is that time and space may not be destroyed by technology but only possibly by faith in Christ and the Second Coming. 

Lebedev’s apocalyptic interpretation of the railroad casts a shadow on the Prince’s birthday. By suggesting that the railroad has destroyed the sources of life, such as the sun, Lebedev seems to undermine light itself, the very force associated with the “new life” Myshkin intended to begin with Aglaya. 

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This materialist committed suicide because he did not believe in the afterlife and because he saw life as being subject to “inertial laws” [kosnye zakony] and permeated by “inertia” [kosnost’]; 

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The narrator con­ tributes by beginning this last part of the novel with a digression on “routine,” presenting it as the inertial principle governing the lives of most people. Such people are unable to change or take control of their lives: 

When, for example, the very essence of certain ordinary people consists of their perpetual and unchanging ordinariness or, what’s even better, when, despite all extraordinary attempts of these people to get, at all costs, out of the rut of ordinariness and routine, and they still end up remaining unchanged and eternally on the same routine, then such people even take on their own sort of typicality, something like ordinariness that on no account wishes to remain that which it is and wants at all costs to become original and independent, not having the slightest means for independence. (8:384) 

When the narrator refers to the inability to “get out of the rut” [vyiti iz kolei], the reader is reminded of the similar railroad metaphor “get off the tracks” [vyiti iz relsov] used previously in the same context of a routine existence (8:269). Although the original association olkoleia is the rut made by wagon wheels, the term is also used for the railroad gauge, thereby associating this metaphor with the railroad. The narrator’s discussion of ordinariness and routine, defined as the inability to get out of a rut (or off a track), thus brings to mind all of the negative associations with railroads in the speeches given at the Prince’s birthday party (8:269). The “routine” that, according to the narrator, governs most people’s existence evokes the inertia referred to, despairingly, elsewhere in Dostoevsky’s works. (This “routine” is analogous to the inertia of matter, which, as Dostoevsky wrote in 1864, “means death” [20:176].) Moreover, the lack of independence and inability to control their activity further implies a mechanical model and suggests that their lives are inertia-ridden. In this manner, inertia and mechanical law are indirectly established as the determining factors in the existence of many of Myshkin’s friends. 

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He had the distinct feeling and suddenly realized that he would flee, that he would indeed flee, but that he was now totally incapable of deciding the issue of whether to flee before or after Shatov; [he suddenly realized] that he was now nothing more than a coarse body, without senses, an inertial mass [inertsionnaia massa] and that he was moved by an external terrible force and that although he did have a passport for abroad, although he could flee from Shatov (and otherwise why should he be hurrying so?), he would, however, not flee before Shatov, not from Shatov, but rather after Shatov, and that that was already decided, signed, sealed, and delivered. (10:430) 

Dostoevsky elaborates the mechanical metaphor when he says a bit later of events the next day that “here suddenly came the awaited impetus, which sud­ denly directed his resolve” (10:431). The reference to an impetus (repeated twenty-five lines later) further develops the image of Liputin as an “inertial mass” acted on by external forces. The details describing Liputin on the eve of murder are reminiscent of the description of Raskolnikov on the eve of his murder of the pawnbroker: “The last day, having dawned so accidentally, deciding everything at once, had an almost totally mechanical effect on him: it was as though someone had taken him by the hand and was dragging him behind, irresistibly, blindly, with unnatural strength, without objections. It was as if part of his clothing had fallen into the wheel of a machine and [the wheel] was starting to pull him into [the machine]” (6:58). In both instances “natural” (scientific) laws were used to sanction murder. Dostoevsky suggests that, once an individual has surrendered to such ready-made ideology, he loses his will and becomes inert matter which is carried along by a force external to him. 

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Through these metaphors of mechanics it becomes clear that revolutionary activity exerts an irresistible attraction over those who have surrendered to socialist ideology. The reduction of Liputin to an “inertial mass” acted upon by “external forces” that appears in the novel is even more explicit than the image of a machine that draws in Liputin (and the others). Whereas the image of the machine evokes technology and mechanics, in general, the direct reference to an “inertial mass” more immediately suggests Newton s laws. It creates the impression of Liputin being dead matter, which may “act,” but only in an inertial way. 

Through these metaphors applied to Liputin in the novel and drafts, Dostoevsky illustrates the idea he expresses directly in statements like “the teaching of the materialists is universal inertia and the mechanization of mat­ ter, it amounts to death” (20:175) or “the main idea of socialism is mechanism” and “[socialists] are wild about the notion that man himself is nothing more than mechanics” (7:161). In Dostoevsky’s view, the revolutionaiy activity of Pyotr Verkhovensky and his circle accelerates death through the violence that results once Christ, self-sacrificing love, and “Thou shalt not kill” are replaced by scientific principles. 

The mechanizing and ultimately fatal nature of the new social ideology is conveyed in the drafts of the novel, in a speech that the Prince makes to Shatov: 

“The reason Nechaev can rest assured,” says the Prince, “is that he believes that Christianity is not only not necessary for the vital life of humanity, but that it is decidedly harmful and that if one could root it out then humanity would at once revive into a new real life. In that lies their terrible strength. The West will not be able to get the better of them: wait and see, everything will perish in their wake.” 

“And what will be left?” 

“A dead machine, which, of course, cannot be brought about, but. . . per­ haps it can too be brought about because in a few centuries the world can be deadened to such an extent that out of desperation it will in fact want to be dead. ‘Fall on us, mountains, and crush us.’ And so it will be. If the resources of science, for example, end up not producing enough food and the world gets too crowded, then babies will be thrown into the latrine or eaten. I would not be surprised if both happen, so it will be, especially if science says so. ‘And the voice of the bridegroom and of the bride are heard no more.’ ” (11:181)8 

The Prince’s apocalyptic vision of the world turning into a dead machine once it has been taken over by people with a scientistic, positivist Nechaev- like outlook is reminiscent of Ippolit’s vision of a godforsaken world, of a world abandoned to the laws of nature, as “a colossal machine of the most up-to- date technology” (8:339). In both cases, the machine becomes an emblem of death. A world without Christ becomes a dead machine. 

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What Dostoevsky intuited, that the principle of inertia in society amounts to the “struggle for survival,” had been worked out by philosophers. Spektorsky, in his Problem of Social Physics in the Seventeenth Century, describes the connection between inertia and self-preservation as follows: 

Where there is motion, there, too, there is inertia. The rationalists of the seventeenth centuiy apply this concept to their study of man. Thus, for example, in the second part of his Ethics, which is devoted to the soul, Spinoza refers to inertia, whether in the form of motion or of rest, and comes to the conclusion that in both instances “the individual maintains its nature.” In this way inertia [inertsiia] is identified with self-preservation, with the impulse to preserve one’s being, suum esse conservare, and even, as Spinoza says, to seek one’s advantage, suum sibi utile quaerer. And so by means of the concept of self-preservation, ethical utilitarianism is linked to physical inertia. Consistent with a broad interpretation of the concept, Spinoza equates self-preservation with the “actual” essence of things. And like him, many others have taken this as axiomatic; thus, for example, Boyle wrote that every entity seeks to preserve itself, omnis est conservatrix sui. Montesquieu and Rousseau likewise insisted on self-preservation as the basic law of nature.9 

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In Dostoevsky’s view, Peter the Great had created an environment that promoted underground man-like inertia on a large scale. This inertia breeds immorality, as we know from the underground man himself and from the following exchange from the drafts for “Drunkards” [P’ianenkie], a work Dostoevsky eventually incorporated into Crime and Punishment: “—We drink because we have nothing to do. —You lie, it is because we have no ethics. —Yes, but we have no ethics because for a long time (150 years) we have had nothing to do” (7:5). In Crime and Punishment, Razumikhin, as he argues with Pyotr Petrovich Luzhin, blames Peter the Great for the inertia of the educated class: 

“And we have been weaned from all activity [delo] for nearly two hundred years. . . . Ideas, if you will, are in the air,” he said, addressing himself to Pyotr Petrovich, “and the desire for good is there, although it is childlike, and honesty can even be found, even though many scoundrels have cropped up, but the capacity for action is still missing.” (6:115) 

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NB. We all have been brought up in the most fantastic inactivity [bezdeia- tel’nost’] and in a two-century-long estrangement from all activity. Bureau­ cratic activity [deiatel’nost’] was a formula for inactivity. It only promoted and allowed one to engage in debauchery. A society which has lost the habit of and to which has been forbidden all forms of civic self-motivated activity [samodeiatel’nost’] has not only not integrated itself but has disintegrated to the point of disaster reaching even to the lower echelons. (24:298-99) 

Here again Dostoevsky stresses the fact that Peters legacy to the Russian elite is a lack of civic autonomy, enforced through the civil service. Trans­ lated from political terms into the language of nineteenth-century physics (and Dostoevskian metaphysics), this lack of autonomy, of samodeiatel’nost’, amounts to Newtons law of inertia. (In the nineteenth century, the term samonedeiatel’nost’ was used as a synonym for inertsiia in physics books.)22 

Although Dostoevsky was responding in this passage to a specific news­ paper article, the indirect reference to inertia suggests his earlier fictional hero, the underground man. Later in the passage, Dostoevsky, in describing what becomes of the civil servant whose inactivity leads to debauchery, notes that a tendency toward daydreaming results, again evoking the fic­ tional underground man: the underground man served in the government bureaucracy; on inheriting money, he retired and submitted to inertia, living a life of debauchery and daydreaming. Dostoevsky thus intimates that the underground man’s personal inertia is the correlate of the civic inertia that reigns as a result of Peter the Greats reforms. 

Similarly, Dostoevsky held that Peter the Great had reduced the peo­ple to a state of inertia by denying them all samodeiatel’nost’ through the institution of serfdom. He wrote in his notebook in 1876: “If the people are debauched, then they are because they have been in bondage, deprived of autonomy” (24:182). Dostoevsky ends the passage quoted above with the following: “ ‘The new era of the Liberator-Tsar: but disorder in the meantime” (24:299). These notes reflect his view that the emancipation marked the end of the Petrine era of Russian history. 

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Dostoevsky’s bureaucrat envisions life in terms of mechanical meta­ phors and models, as can be seen from his statement that “It turns out that we are, so to speak, like some magnet, to which everything up until now has been and for a long time yet will be attracted” (27:30). The bureaucrat sums up his worldview when he speaks for the whole class of bureaucrats, saying: “We resist extinction, so to speak, out of inertia. This inertia is dear to us because, in truth, it is what keeps everything in our day going” (27:30). The bureaucrat thus reveals his conviction that inertia is not only all the bureaucracy has to keep itself going but the prime mover of the rest of society as well. 

Of this bureaucrat, Dostoevsky writes: “Naturally, in my heart of hearts I do not agree with him. And besides only people on the way out speak in such a tone. Yet still there was something to what he said” (27:31). It would seem that Dostoevsky agreed with the bureaucrat’s estimation that the inertia characteristic of the Petrine bureaucracy was manifest in many other aspects of life. 

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THE NAROD AND THE ANNIHILATION OF INERTIA 

From Dostoevsky’s point of view, salvation for Russict from the legacy of Peter—from the political and social inertia that resulted from his “reform”— depended on reuniting with the narod the Europeanized segment of the population, which had been reduced to do-nothingness. In the subscription notice for Time he wrote on the eve of the emancipation, Dostoevsky heralded this reunion, placing in it all his hopes for Russia’s rebirth. 

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Stepan Trofimovich may die feeling reconciled to the narod, but whether this reconciliation would have lasted is doubtful. As Dostoevsky searched artistically for heroes who would be able to annihilate inertia, he began to realize that chronological age is relevant. At one point Stavrogin remarks that “apparently it is true that the second half of a man s life ordinarily consists of nothing but the habits amassed in the first half.” Although on some level, Dostoevsky cherished the notion that a man could “begin a new life,” he appears to have granted some (empirical) truth to the statement made by Stavrogin. Old men, as they face death, may, like Verkhovensky, be ripe for conversions; yet these conversions are not complete, since the “new life” into which they are inaugurated is cut short by death. In his struggle to create heroes who could annihilate inertia rather than be annihilated by it, Dostoevsky in his next two novels, The Adolescent and Brothers Karamazov, turned to youth. 

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The Devils, much like The Idiot, ends with the triumph of mechanics and inertia. In his subsequent novels, The Adolescent and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky looks to these younger generations, and the new science, with greater hope that inertia can be annihilated. 

Page 178

Gentlemen, we are all cruel, we are all monsters, we all make people cry, mothers and babes-in-arms, but of us all—and may this be established right now—of us all, I myself am the most base reptile! So be it! Every day of my life, I, beating my breast, promised to reform and every day I committed the same foul acts. I understand now that on people like me a blow is necessary, a blow of fate, in order to seize one as in a lasso and whirl one around with an external force. Never, never would I have picked myself up by myself! But thunder struck. I accept the torment of guilt and of my universal shame, I want to suffer and through suffering I will cleanse myself! I may, indeed, cleanse myself, gentlemen, what do you say? (14:458) 

Although Dmitry does not (as other Dostoevskian heroes do) use the word inertia to describe “every day promising to reform and every day committing the same foul acts,” the concept is implicit in this passage, particularly when he says that he would never have been able to change his life had it not been for an “external force”—the “blow of fate” that grabbed him up and twirled him as in a lasso.12 

What has changed in the scheme is that Dostoevsky allows the inter­ ference of an external, providential force. In “The Meek One” the husband had blamed fate for his tragedy (he equates it with inertia; his wife’s death he blames on a “simple, barbaric, inertial [kosnyi] chance”); in Mitya’s life fate has proved to be a providential force. In this sense, in The Brothers Karamazov, human beings are just as subject to inertia as in previous works, but the sway of inertia over human existence is mitigated by external forces that, in Mitya’s case, prove to be salvific. 

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In the life of Dmitiy Karamazov, Dostoevsky demonstrates man’s sus­ ceptibility to mechanical behavior, his inability to enact change in his own life; but Dostoevsky also, however, introduces the notion that providence can serve as an external force, interrupting the inertia of existence and setting a person on the right track. Furthermore, he rejects the notion that the human mind functions in accordance to scientific principles, reminding us instead of God’s image. Through the figure of Ivan, Dostoevsky explores the meaning of time and its relationship to the laws of nature and suggests an “otherworldly” frame of reference from which the harmony of existence may be perceived.